1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus, an information processing method, and a computer program product.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, in a product printing field as what is called the printing industry, small-lot and diversified printing has been mainstream rather than offset mass printing. In this tendency, as for printing machines, electrophotography and ink jet on-demand printing machines suitable for on-demand printing have been used more frequently than conventional offset printing machines. When the diversified printing is controlled in the on-demand printing machines, job management by a print server is important.
In the small-lot and diversified printing, a period to the deadline is extremely short in many cases. In these cases, it has been common practice to print a corresponding job between other jobs by an on-demand printing machine during printing using an interruption printing function or the like of a print server while considering the deadlines of other print matters. Furthermore, when the print job for which the interruption printing is performed is not newly printed but reprinted, time for raster image processor (RIP) processing can be saved by executing printing of a raster image of a previous job remaining in a print queue again rather than execution of the RIP processing by importing a job newly.
For example, Japanese Patent No. 3016505 discloses an image formation apparatus capable of performing the above-mentioned interruption printing because the image formation apparatus has a job list display function so as to enable job selection and setting change to be performed on a job list. The image formation apparatus as disclosed in Japanese Patent No. 3016505 is also effective when printing should be performed while changing setting little by little for color matching in proof printing or other reasons.
Recent print servers (for example, Fiery (registered trademark) server manufactured by Electronics for Imaging, Inc.) can focus on a certain setting item and sort (rearrange) setting values of the focused setting item in addition to the job list display function. With this function, a job that is desired to be printed is easy to find among a large number of jobs by selecting a job name (setting item), for example, for sorting. It is apparent that sorting can be performed by setting items other than the job name and a desired job can be found by sorting the jobs by a setting item such as a user name and a print paper size of the job. A user can also freely change the setting items that are displayed on the job list.
In the recent printing industry, a plurality of jobs are collectively printed with the same setting in some cases. In this case, even conventional print servers sort a large number of jobs displayed on a job list by a certain setting item such as a job name and specify a job for instruction of setting change or reprinting. It is however difficult to specify a desired job when a large number of other jobs with similar job names or similar settings are displayed, resulting in a complicated operation.
Therefore, there is a need for an information processing apparatus, an information processing method, and a computer program product that are capable of specifying a desired job easily and improving convenience.